‘Well, maybe. Of course, there are other explanations. A drug gang. Travellers. Gypsies. Your presence down here wasn’t exactly a secret. Scientists are rich. They have fancy gear. I know how crooks think. This was an easy target, whether or not Pierre Berewa was involved.’
Luc was half-listening, half-watching the lieutenant lifting Pierre up by a stiff shoulder to see if anything was under his body. He saw something. An archaeologist’s eye. ‘What’s that?’
‘Where?’ Billeter asked.
‘Near his left hand.’
With Toucas moving in to keep Pierre’s shoulder and upper body off the ground, Billeter shone his torch underneath and pulled out a block of brown cakey material, the size of a dozen pencils bundled together.
Toucas put on a single glove to receive it and sniffed at it. ‘What is this, professor?’
Luc had no clue and said it wasn’t anything to do with his excavation.
‘I have some ideas, but I’d rather not say for now. We’ll have it analysed. Everything will be analysed, you can be sure of that,’ Toucas said.
‘You need to know something,’ Luc said suddenly.
‘Go on.’
‘Last night I was in England, in Cambridge. Someone tried to run me over with a car. He got away.’
‘And what do the police think?’
‘They thought it was probably a drunk driver.’
Toucas shrugged.
‘This morning, I was on my way to an appointment with a scientific collaborator. There was an explosion at the office park before I got there. There were many casualties.’
‘I heard something on the radio. I’ve been busy today,’ Toucas sniffed. ‘Other than the fact you’ve had a bad run at the tables, Professor, why are you telling me this?’
‘Because, maybe there’s some kind of connection. All these things just don’t happen.’
‘Why not? Things happen all the time. Conspiracy theorists make a living of stringing random events like different-sized beads into one ugly necklace. This is not what we do in my command.’
‘Could you at least talk to the police in England?’ Luc asked. He fished a business card from his wallet that one of the Cambridge officers had given him. Toucas took it and slipped it in his breast pocket as if he had no intention of ever looking at it again.
There were faraway calls from inside the cave.
‘Despite everything,’ Luc said miserably, ‘we’re going to have to protect the integrity of the cave. We can’t have people just walking around with no safeguards.’
‘Yes, yes,’ Toucas said, dismissively. ‘You can help us strike a balance between our needs and yours, I’m sure. A protocol, perhaps.’
A head popped through the tunnel into the Vault of Hands but it wasn’t a member of the gendarmerie.
It was Marc Abenheim.
He had a sweet-and-sour look on his officious face. In the face of all this horror, something was pleasing him.
‘There you are!’ Luc cringed at his nasal smugness. ‘I was told you were down here.’ He looked around, blinking nervously and sniffed, ‘Oh dear!’ at the sight of Pierre’s body. When he had visited during the excavation, Luc recalled he had trouble making eye contact. Now he was latching on with laser beams. ‘I didn’t expect to be back so quickly. It’s good to see the cave again but not under these circumstances. What a tragedy! The Minister herself sends her condolences.’
‘Thank you, Marc. You didn’t have to come all the way from Paris. It’s a matter for the authorities.’
Abenheim tried not to look at Pierre’s body. Luc knew they’d met. He had assigned Pierre to take Abenheim on his obligatory cave tour. ‘I’m afraid I did have to come. Can we speak in private?’
They withdrew to the adjacent vault. The bright, almost gaily painted hands all around them were discordant, bordering on absurd, considering the circumstances.
‘I seem to be seeing you only on unfortunate occasions,’ Abenheim said.
‘It seems so.’
‘These kinds of things are unprecedented in French archaeology. One excavation, so many deaths. It’s a very serious matter.’
‘I assure you, Marc, I know that.’
‘Professor Barbier is concerned. The Minister is concerned. There’s a danger of the image of this spectacular national monument being tarnished by these human tragedies.’
Luc was almost amused that Abenheim was parroting his words from the first ministry meeting – ‘spectacular national monument’. ‘I’m sure it will be a footnote to every report and popular article about Ruac in the future,’ Luc replied. ‘That much is unavoidable, I’m sure, but I’m also sure that now is not the right time to think of these matters.’
‘The ministry depends on me to think about these matters!’
‘What do you want us to do, Marc? What do you want me to do?’
‘I want you to resign as director of the excavation.’
To Luc, the stencilled hands seemed to be in motion, rotating in a slow clockwise swirl.
He heard himself answering this snivelling son-of-a-bitch. ‘Zvi Alon’s accident. Hugo Pineau’s car crash. This attack on the camp. These are random acts. Horrible random acts.’ He stopped for a moment to listen to his own argument. Minutes ago he was trying to convince Colonel Toucas to keep an open mind about connections. In exasperation he asked, ‘How will my resignation help explain anything or bring closure to anyone?’
‘Random acts? Perhaps. But there’s one link, Luc, and we can’t ignore it.’
‘What link?’
‘They all happened under your watch. You have to take responsibility. You have to go. The commission has named me the new director effective immediately.’
TWENTY-THREE
Ruac Cave, 30,000 BP
Tal had begun calling the red liquid Soaring Water.
No one could say a man was meant to fly. But after drinking Soaring Water, no one could say where a man ended and a bird began.
How often had he looked up at birds on the wing and wondered what they could see and how they felt?
Now he knew.
Fear quickly gave way to exhilaration and a sensation of overwhelming power.
The power to soar on the wind, to see great distances, to feel more deeply, the power to understand.
He would always return from his journeys where they had begun – by the fire. He was sure he had been on remarkable adventures, spanning time and great distances but his people insisted his body had been rooted, restless, to be sure, thrashing, spouting strange utterances, but very much rooted to one spot. And everyone learned how to deal with the aftermath, a turbulent period they called, Tal’s Anger.
Throughout the clan, there had been anxiety and worry during his first soaring journey. Tal’s fate was fixed by his brother’s death. His father was growing weaker by the day and the very existence of the Bison Clan was dependent on his ability to rise to his position and lead them into the future.
His insistence on trying the red liquid was a matter of furious debate. Tal had argued that the boy Gos had been made to drink the liquid by their ancestors to show the clan a new path forward. A grand plan was playing out in front of their eyes. First Tal’s father was sickened and weakened by his accident. Then Nago was killed by the sacred bison. Then Gos drank the powerful liquid Tal had prepared to heal Nago.
These were not unconnected events.
Tal argued he was meant to learn from the teachings of the Soaring Liquid. When his father passed, he was meant to be a bold new clan leader.
The Elders counselled otherwise. If Tal were lost, what would become of the clan? The risk was too great.
